Culture Blues

8 NYC Transit Projects That We Promise Will Get Finished Someday

A vintage look at our Future.

For most New Yorkers, the letters MTA induce thoughts of rising prices and increasingly infrequent trains. Of disrupted weekend service and overcrowded subways. These thoughts, in turn, induce feelings of anxiety, rage and, eventually, resignation.

So, it was with considerable surprise that I noticed ads on the subway for the “The Future Beneath Us” museum exhibit touting 8 projects currently underway that will change New York. Not only are they rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, they’re telling us how great next year’s cruise is going to be. Despite seeming like a perfect fit, this ad placement is dubious. Aside from tourists who think that riding the subway is “neat-o,” the only future anyone on the train is thinking about is their own. And they’re hoping it involves getting off the train safely and not getting groped. New York is a city that has kept the Bodies exhibit (which costs almost $30 per person to get into) open for 4 years with no end in sight. Yet, not once, did I hear anyone even mention this free transit exhibit.

I’m not quite sure what I expected heading into the exhibit, but it was definitely of the cool and seemingly unattainable variety. Quieter trains that don’t sound like 747s flying right past your ear while you wait for the local. Metrocard machines that actually take credit cards, all the time. Maybe even this awesome flying fish train they’ve been advertising for the past few years.

Now, THIS is the Future.

Regardless, I was expecting excitement, pizzazz. This was, after all, the Future that we were talking about. If you’re selling the Future, you wouldn’t trot out over due projects that were conceived decades ago, would you? Well, that’s exactly what the MTA would do.

The 8 projects are, in order of lameness (starting with the most lame):

The Trans-Hudson Express Tunnel – Will make it easier and more convenient for people from New Jersey to get into New York. Wait, why are we doing this again?
 

East Side Access – This LIRR terminal below Grand Central station will “save riders over half an hour of backtracking by taxi, subway, bus, or foot from Penn Station.” Because, really, why should LIRR riders have to do the sort of things the rest of us do every single day?

The 7 Subway Extension – Will extend the 7 line to the west side of Manhattan so that we can develop the hell out of it.

The World Trade Center Transportation Hub – Features an Oculus Exterior “meant to suggest a dove gaining flight” with wings rising 150 feet in the air. No, I’m not on drugs. The claim that “natural light will reach PATH platforms 60 feet below ground” is sure to be much less impressive than it sounds.

The Fulton Street Transit Center – It’s a shiny new subway station, and I love shiny new subway stations. Also, no mention of even a projected completion date makes it all the more mysterious and alluring.

An absolutely gorgeous place for people to hide from the rain and get in your way while you're trying to get to the subway.

The Croton Water Filtration Plant – Filtration plants=not exciting. Filtration plants that are underneath a golf course and driving range=maybe sort of exciting if you’re the kind of rich asshole who likes to golf.

City Water Tunnel #3 – Yes, it’s a big tunnel that carries water. So, why is it so high on this list? Well, it’s the only project that has actually shown real progress. Sure, construction started in 1970, but Stage 1 actually went into service in 1998. The future beneath us, indeed!

The Second Avenue Subway – Giving you the whole convoluted history of this project would take up too much space and require the use of intricate charts (it’s so famous for not existing that it has a blog named after it). But proposals date back to the 20s, with stalled efforts to build it in the 40s and 70s. Funding (for Phase 1) was finally secured in 2007. It’s all happening.

One problem is immediately evident, the selection of projects. Two projects that almost exclusively benefit Long Island and New Jersey commuters. Two projects (Croton Water Filtration and City Water Tunnel #3) are the kinds of things you could only get excited about if you’re REALLY in to public works.  The most exciting thing about these two is the City Water Tunnel’s “Simon Says” incident, when construction was famously delayed after terrorists prematurely flooded the tunnel and John McClane urban surfed a big truck through it. The 7 line extension is, quite frankly, too small and insignificant to garner much interest in this setting. The Second Avenue Subway is an epic and exciting project, but only Phase 1 (from 96^th to 63^rd) should really be part of this exhibit because it’s the only one that has funding. The other three phases are still far off pipe dreams.

The exhibit isn’t as informative or insightful as you might expect. Information about how the projects are physically being executed is limited to some talk about different underground drilling methods that almost put me to sleep while I was standing. Talk about design is non-existent. Renderings of what the projects will look like are vague and superficial. Phrases such as “the project was delayed” are thrown about frequently with absolutely no explanation. Quotes are not from experts, but rather from public officials lobbying their case. At times, the people who created the exhibit seem to not be aware of their audience at all.

Just one of New York's fine construction workers.

Many of my criticisms about the information and the way it’s being dispensed is encapsulated in one example. Honestly, one of the most puzzling things I’ve ever seen in a museum exhibit. Efforts at the beginning of the Twentieth Century to get Croton water filtered failed when city officials and civic leaders decided that the water was perfectly fine. The exhibit’s recounting of these events inexplicably and ominously ends with the sentence “It still is—most of the time.” That’s it.

Not only does it imply that water from Croton is sometimes unsafe, it does so with a sinister sneer. What’s even worse, they never explain why the Croton Water Filtration Plant is, in fact, being built. They tell us that concerns about safety were deemed unfounded almost 100 years ago, and they tell us that they are now building the filtration plant. They never bridge the gap between these two pieces of information.

The whole promise of the Future is misleading, as this exhibit is obsessed with the past. In almost every case, they spend more time on the project’s original conception and the history of its false starts and delays than they do on its current state and what it’s actually going to look like/do for us. Maybe they are just drawing on the much more ample information that is available regarding the histories of these projects, as opposed to the nebulous details about how or when they might be finished. After all, most of them have been in gestation for ages.

In the future we will all be ghosts.

That’s when the pieces start to fall into place. The focus on history is supposed to drive home the point that the MTA is on its way to completing projects that have been in limbo for decades. This isn’t an informational exhibit. It’s part of a PR campaign. The whole thing screams “Don’t you people understand what we’re dealing with? We just need another 20-30 years and a few more massive boatloads of money! Things will get better, we promise!” Fortunately for the MTA, it’s a PR campaign that they smartly got started early. Michael Bloomberg didn’t strike out at the MTA in his bid to become the first King of New York since Christopher Wallace until early August, when the exhibit had already been open for 6 months. Unfortunately for the MTA, no one went to see their exhibit/commercial. And, despite national trends, lots of New Yorkers still read the newspapers, where Bloomberg was quoted saying that NYC transit has “fallen behind.” How much it fell behind in the last 8 years while he’s been mayor is still undisclosed.

This exhibit certainly didn’t impress Bloomberg, who claimed that “the MTA needs to do more to plan for our future. Much more.” Obviously, we can’t trust anything that Bloomberg says right now, but if this is the “future” that the MTA is currently offering, I’m inclined to agree with him.